I’M USED to covering the news, but it’s not often that I am the news!

That’s what happened today after I popped out on my lunch break on what would have been a completely ordinary Monday afternoon, had I not been wearing pyjamas for a feature I’m working on. And then bumped into a lovely lady near the sandwich shop just around the corner from Champion HQ. With a camera.

This follow up report on Southport GB, a community website serving the town and surrounding areas, is pretty much exactly what I expected it to be – a brief report, a photo, and lots of abuse from the website’s fiercely loyal users.

So far I’ve been called a plonker, an idiot, and an attention seeker, and I’ve been told that I really ought to have better things to write about, and that my chances of getting a job with the broadsheets are none whatsoever.

To be fair, I knew I was going to get a pasting about it, so I’m not too fussed other than to say the following:

1) Thank you Phil (Rodwell, the man behind Southport GB) for the free publicity ahead of this week’s Champion. It’s always nice to get a plug.

2) I definitely wasn’t wasting my time, just using it more efficiently, because the height of my pyjama palaver was turning up to work in my jimjams, going about my day as I would any other, and getting shouted at – and snapped by Southport GB – on my lunch break.

3) Yes, crazyfrog, the pyjamas and slippers were new, but the dressing gown wasn’t. It’s just been washed.

4) Whistleblower is right, I wouldn’t have got a job at The Champion if I’d turned up dressed for the interview dressed like that. But thanks for pointing it out.

5) We are definitely not “just like the other local rag.....can't get their own stories so jump on the southport.gb.com bandwagon”. If anything, taking pictures of a Champion reporter out on a feature is the other way around.

6) Yes, we do have better things to do. There all in this week’s and next week’s Champion. They’re the other stories we’ve written.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Southport GB a lot, but it has such polite and mild-mannered readers, doesn’t it?

The full feature on my pyjamas experience will be published in this week's Champion, out on Wednesday, February 24.

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